Perfume, in This Case,' Made by Nose'

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Roja Dove, in his atelier in London’s Mayfair district, which is decorated with gilded mirrors, vintage crystal bottles by Lalique and Baccarat and purple velvet drapes.CreditCreditAndrew Testa for The New York Times

By Libby Banks

Nov. 3, 2013

LONDON — Roja Dove’s patrons say that a visit to his workshop is like a session on the psychiatrist’s couch.

And from his tiny atelier in the Shepherd Market area of Mayfair, Mr. Dove, 57, is in the business of fashioning personal olfactory moments, bespoke fragrances that spark clients’ half-forgotten memories and desires.

His name always appears on lists of the world’s premier “noses,” the industry’s affectionate term for a skilled perfumer, and he says he is able to identify 800 different perfumes from a single squirt.

As a teenager in Chichester, England, during the early 1970s, Mr. Dove discovered Guerlain, one of the oldest and most prestigious of France’s fragrance houses. While friends frittered away their pocket money, he saved to buy Jicky, a citrus, lavender and vanilla composition first created in 1889 by Aimé Guerlain.

The romantic notions of the scent ignited something in Mr. Dove, and after six months studying medicine at Cambridge University and a brief period as a fashion model in London, he was offered an apprenticeship at Guerlain in 1981.

Four years later he had attained the lofty — if ambiguous — job title of professeur de parfum. Mr. Dove worked for the family’s last master perfumer, Jean-Paul Guerlain, and crisscrossed continents to train employees on how to match scents to customers until he resigned in 2001.

He now is an independent consultant and lecturer, and has been operating the Roja Dove Haute Parfumerie in Harrods since 2004.

Two years ago he also introduced Roja Parfums, his own fragrance line for men and women, which is sold by upscale retailers including Bergdorf Goodman in New York and the perfume boutique Jovoy in Paris. The fragrances have mischievous titles like Scandal, Danger, Fetish and Innuendo, and cost about $360 for a 100 milliliter, or 3.4 fluid ounce, bottle.

But Mr. Dove’s special talents are reserved for clients with special bank balances. For 25,000 pounds, or $40,350, he will create a bespoke fragrance, a process that takes a year or two and ends with 500 milliliters of a fragrance that is like none other.

He says he has an average of six to 10 such customers each year, and he is unapologetic about the cost, comparing the process and price to haute couture.

As for his clients, he will not disclose their identities but says they come from two camps: “the fabulously wealthy who want the best of everything” and those that “love perfume so much that they’ll bust the bank if need be.”

In addition to a keen sense of smell, which he calls “both a curse and a blessing — long-haul flights are particularly unpleasant,” Mr. Dove’s main tool is what the industry calls a perfume organ.

His custom-made leather Dunhill case holds small eyedropper bottles with the 238 tinctures, resinoids, absolutes and essential oils that comprise the “building blocks of every single fragrance that you can think of.” It also folds neatly into a piece of hand luggage should a client require him to pay a flying visit.

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A selection of Mr. Dove's fragrances and the various ingredients that he uses.CreditAndrew Testa for The New York Times

“Most of my formulas are quite short, normally between 20 and 50 ingredients,” he says. “It’s like painting; if you use too many colors, all you get is a dirty gray.”

The fragrance industry’s obsession with the new and the brash frustrates Mr. Dove. “The problem is that people don’t talk about perfume anymore, they talk about brands; they wear Chanel or Dolce,” he said. “But I’m interested in talking about what aldehyde does to ylang-ylang.”

When he starts work on a bespoke fragrance, “the first time is about getting to know each other, ideally over a cup of tea,” he said. “I need them to be comfortable enough to say whatever pops into their mind.”

Such meetings may be held in Mr. Dove’s atelier, which is decorated with gilded mirrors, vintage crystal bottles by Lalique and Baccarat and purple velvet drapes. The setting emphasizes the sense that this is a luxurious experience, enhanced by the perfumer’s gold jewelry that glistens as he swishes a fragrance blotter underneath his nose.

Eventually Mr. Dove narrows down the customer’s likes and dislikes within the three scent families: for women, floral; chypre, with woody notes; and oriental, based in rich vanilla and musk. For men, the families are chypre, oriental and fougère, characterized by herb and woody scents.

Human beings are good at classifying odors but they are bad at identifying them, Mr. Dove explained, so he insists on a series of blind tests to avoid unhelpful preconceptions.

“I’ve always said that a rose has neither a vagina nor a penis,” he said. “It’s totally down to marketing. Rose on a man’s skin is masculine; rose on a woman’s skin is feminine.”

Mr. Dove says that the main responses to odor are learned during childhood. While most people are born liking sweetness and disliking bitterness, most scents attain value because they have been paired with an experience, creating highly individual reactions, he said.

For example, Mr. Dove had three clients smell tuberose. One gave a horrified shudder, while the other two described the scent as, respectively, “quiche with cabbage” and “young girls in tank tops running around a mall.”

“Smell is so instant and evocative that it fundamentally impacts your very being,” Mr. Dove said. “My clients have a positive association with all the elements that I use in their fragrance, so in a way it is the ultimate pick-me-up.”

Subjective factors also influence the final blend. “I ask myself a lot of questions: How do they dress? How they carry themselves? How do they interact?” Mr. Dove said.

The first trials of a blend usually are ready within three to six months, and getting it right is necessary, as Mr. Dove’s ingredients are costly.

He said it took five million new blossoms, picked before sunrise, to produce one kilogram, or 2.2 pounds, of jasmine oil, which costs £32,000.

And the sweet and musky ambergris, which, he noted, “is sometimes called the pearl of the whale but is basically whale vomit that has oxidized in the sea,” goes for approximately £100,000 a kilogram.

Knowing when it is time to stop tweaking can be difficult, but Mr. Dove believes that there is one simple way to tell whether the fragrance is ready: “My clients can get excited when they smell it on the blotter.

“But I always say that just like a great love affair, it is only when you’ve spent the night together that you know if it is going to work.”